Dark. Purple Night. I stood on an empty street corner beneath a lonely, cheerful street lamp. A bottle in my hand, a freshly fallen snowflake on my head. I looked up to see the winter precipitation spawning toward me; there were no pink roses.

Without moving my feet I began floating down the street. I felt like infinity trapped within an anecdote. I felt as though a bear in a birdcage must have felt, but with the glimmering ray of hope that the door would soon burst open. Dry cereal had taken control of my thoughts; however, the beer promptly washed that away.

The sun peeked above the horizon like a child over a tabletop—it seemed blinding in my inebriety. In my mind, I transcended through time to watch an elderly man pass, to see another variety store erected (oh, how drunk that made me feel), a boy on his first bicycle ride, a young girl’s carefully constructed sand castle become one with the sea, only seconds after she’d completed it by embedding a plastic flag in between grains, and the fast-forwarded development of a caterpillar into a butterfly. The daze might’ve lasted four hundred flips of an hourglass.

My drift continued. Straight on into the night. Each step splashed droplets from spring puddles onto the back of my pants and some couple somewhere had just filed for divorce.

Time elapsed rapidly. Probably no more quickly than usual. It was one of those moments in intoxication that so many people must have felt throughout space and time—when you feel as though some great discovery or personal revelation is on the frontier.

The street lamp looked slightly less cheerful, but a lot less lonely. Man-made incandescence was no longer necessary. Sober, my head wet from the melted snowflake, then suddenly, a bead of water fell from my face and exploded on the petals of the huge rose that lay in my hand.